The Olden Time
Antiquity! the olden time! the hoary, venerable past! there is something sacred and soul subduing in the very sound of the words. Like the dying echo of the last tones of the departed, it is full of hallowed memories, and cherished associations, that haunt the inner chambers of the imagination, and linger with a mournful tenderness about the better feelings of the heart.
But what have we to do with Antiquity! They of the old World, who were grey with time and tottering with decay when, but yesterday, they saw us spring into being, laugh at our sometime boast of Antiquity; and well they may, for it is hardly as well substantiated as that of the simple boy who conceived himself the oldest person in the world, because he could not remember when he was born. Yet even we, in the New World, we, of its second or third generation, whose fathers were present at its birth and baptism, even we begin to talk gravely of the olden time, and to sigh and look sad over the melancholy grandeur of the past!
Well, be it so. In these stirring times, an age is shorter, and sooner achieved, than in those of “thesluggish eld.” Time is measured by events, and not by revolutions of the sun—by the progress of the mind, not by the slow sifting sands of the hour glass, and the amazing precocity of these latter days makes many ages out of a single century.
But what a vandal spirit is innovation! what a ruthless destroyer is this boasted modern improvement! It sweeps over the land with the energy of a new creation, demolishing and scattering whatever lies in its way, for the mere pleasure of reproducing it in a new and better form. It removes the ancient land marks, obliterates the last traces of ancient power and grandeur, levels mountains, fills up valleys, turns the courses of rivers, and makes all things bend to its iron will.
It works such rapid and magical changes in its headlong career, that few of us are able to point out what has been, or to predict with certainty what will be to morrow. Let us cherish then, with deeper veneration, the few relics that remain of the days of our fathers. Let us reverence Antiquity such as it is. Let the street commissioner, and the improver of old estates—
Spare that ancient house,
Touch not a single brick—
It is almost alone in its sombre dignity, in the midst of younger and gayer edifices, that have swept New Orleans as it was, into the shade of oblivion. Antiquity—I mean, if I may be allowed the Irish figure of speech—modern Antiquity, her countenance grave with sorrow, with here and there a furrow upon her yet ample brow, protests against the desecration of all that was dear and sacred. Standing on the verge of annihilation, with “one foot in the grave,” and conscious that her days are numbered, her dissolution nigh at hand, she commands, she implores us to save one memento of the past, one legible souvenir of “the days of auld lang syne.” And here it is.